CONSTRAINTS ON ANALOGICAL REASONING: WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY OR EXECUTIVE CONTROL?

Since people differ inter-individually in the effectiveness of their analogical reasoning, an important question deals with elementary cognitive parameters, which potentially con-strain analogy-making. Among the candidate parameters that have been investigated, the capacity of working memory (WM) and ex-ecutive control (EC) are the most widely rec-ognized determinants of reasoning. An ex-periment, which utilizes a test of analogical reasoning on figural material and two versions of the n-back task, which imposes a load on both WM and EC, is presented. Results con-firm that analogical reasoning is related to EC but they show that enlarging the WM load is not necessarily related to scores in the analogy test